<\/p>\n

Staring.<\/h1>\n

For me, staring is a critical part of the creative process. It\u2019s like a meditation except that the rules (actually, non-rules) are to let yourself follow any promising thought that appears in your mind\u2019s eye\u2014as opposed to the \u201cserious\u201d business of following your breath (trust me, it ain\u2019t going anywhere\u2026)<\/p>\n

Trees have always been my go-to staring non-object. These days, it\u2019s the swaths of hard and softwoods marching in formation across Mount Wantastiquet (Atowi:\u00a0Wantastegok Wojo<\/em>) on the other side of the Connecticut River, or the oaks creating a canopy over Lake Dunmore. (My go-to Abenaki expert says the Native American source of the lake name is elusive.) At other times and places it\u2019s been a row of maples above a steep bank, a single tree in front of an office window, or a whole peach orchard outside a screened-in porch. (Interesting that it\u2019s easier to remember what I stared at more than what I wrote.)<\/p>\n

The other day, I got curious about what happens in your brain when you stare. I had images of calming dopamine and happy-go-lucky serotonin molecules zooming around through wide-open neural pathways, leaping headlong into the receptive axons, triggering a brilliant new idea here and then another one there. A cluster f\u2014k of exuberant synapses.<\/p>\n

Imagine my concern, if not outright horror, when my quick search yielded references to something called \u201cabsence seizures,\u201d a childhood condition caused by \u201cabnormal brain activity\u201d which is, of course, my favorite kind. During one of these seizures, kids will suddenly stop doing what they are doing, their eyelids may flutter, and they might not respond when spoken to (which, I thought, is pretty much what kids do anyway.)<\/p>\n

NB: These little \u201cseizures are usually not super serious but people who know a lot more about kids\u2019 brain health than I do say they may be worth checking out.<\/em><\/p>\n

Creatively productive staring has become harder in the 21st Century now that all human knowledge is at your fingertips. Just when the ideas are starting to float untethered before your mind\u2019s eye, you convince yourself that you\u00a0immediately\u00a0<\/em>have to find out how much stronger fentanyl is than morphine (about 100x depending on the purity); who\u2019s really buried in Grant\u2019s tomb (nobody\u2014he\u2019s in an above-ground sarcophagus); or whether it\u2019s going to snow on Friday (80% chance).<\/p>\n

Once you pick up your iPhone to find answers to questions like these, your staring session is essentially over. You might as well open your laptop and put your nose to the grindstone (which refers to millers leaning over to smell whether the stone is getting so hot it\u2019ll scorch the flour).<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t worry. Soon, you\u2019ll have another chance to settle back, look out the window, and stare. If you\u2019re lucky you might get to see what Wendy saw as a child.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When my wife Wendy was in kindergarten, her mother Ellie had a \u201cteacher\u2019s conference.\u201d The teacher said her only concern was that \u201cWendy stares out the window a lot.\u201d Ellie, an artist, was very pleased to hear that. To her, it was a sign of creativity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[6,9,20,31,53,98,125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidblistein.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3246"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidblistein.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidblistein.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidblistein.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidblistein.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3246"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/davidblistein.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3608,"href":"https:\/\/davidblistein.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3246\/revisions\/3608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidblistein.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidblistein.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidblistein.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}